Sunday, 27 December 2015

I sent a note to Trudeau and Tootoo
asking for them to take fish farms out of the water and set them up on land to
protect wild salmon, eliminate environmental damage and end the free release of
climate-change sewage.

My list of 123 on-land systems shows
that the Norwegian fish farm claim that it is too expensive is disingenuous. As
you will see, Norway has gotten fed up with the environmental damage that
Marine Harvest, Cermaq and Grieg Seafood cause in their own country and is
giving out free licences for on-land farms to move the industry out of the ocean.
We should be doing the same in Canada with the same companies.

When I generate a figure, or accept one
from a report, I do a lot of work so that I am sure of what I say before I say
it. An example is the sewage cost of $10.4 Billion in BC, which equals the
entire human sewage put out in BC. I looked at sewage treatment in Victoria,
the CRD, Vancouver, GVRD, Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax, Milwaukee, talked with the engineers
of the Calgary Bonnybrook plant, read several reports, including one right on
subject from Nova Scotia, as well as investigated Scotland, Norway itself, and Chile,
the saddest, dirtiest country of them all.

My figure is conservative and the other
end of the reasonable spectrum is, surprisingly, triple the $10.4 Billion
figure – hard to believe yet true. Do also scan the list of 220 News Bites of
global news from the last six months. I think you will be shocked. Also, the BC
Stats report I cite, was actually done for and paid by DFO. They have never
used one stat from their own report, only had their economists increase the
multiplier number for jobs 230% from 1700 to 3900. Sorry DFO, that’s bogus.

Anyway, for a whole slew of reasons the
way of the future is on land and you can see the link below to an article that
concludes we are on the tipping point from sea to shore.

Here is my Christmas day note. Please
consider sending one yourself:

Dear
PM Justin Trudeau and DFO Minister Tootoo

I
am writing to ask you to get fish farms out of the oceans of this country,
particularly in BC where I live, and to eliminate the conflict of interest that
DFO has with fish farms; as the Cohen Commission also said: DFO needs to
concentrate on saving wild Pacific salmon. This is as big an issue in BC as
stopping the Enbridge pipeline.

The
government of Norway, where Marine Harvest, Cermaq and Grieg Seafood come from,
is so fed up with the environmental damage caused by its own companies that it
is giving away free licences for on-land farms - to get the industry out of the
ocean. In-ocean farms must pay an auction price of $9- to $12-million per
licence. In BC the same companies pay a measly $5,000. That means the licence
subsidy for in-ocean BC fish farms is: $1.17- to 1.56-Billion that grants them the
use of BC water as a free, open sewer, that Norway will no longer tolerate from
the same companies.

We
don’t want fish farms in the water either. Where people have to live with fish
farms they overwhelmingly reject them. In BC 110,000 people signed a petition
to stop expansion and get the industry out of the water: https://www.change.org/p/restore-wild-salmon-ban-salmon-feedlots-in-bc.
This number far exceeds any petition against Enbridge that I have seen.

I
estimate the sewage cost in BC from in-ocean fish farms to be $10.4 Billion. In
Norway, the sewage far exceeds that from the entire human population of 8.1
Million. And fish farms don’t contribute much to the BC economy – nowhere near
the damage cost they inflict. They say 6,000 jobs and $800 Million, however,
the only believable stats, by BC Stats, says 1700 multiplier jobs and $469
Million, with a tiny contribution to GDP, for all of aquaculture, of only $61.9
Million, less than 10% of the contribution from the rest of the fishing
sectors.

I
made a point of looking into the actual job numbers and found it is only 795
actual jobs in BC. So for the huge environmental damage we suffer, it is for
only a handful of jobs. It makes no economic or environmental sense.

And
the problems in the global fish farm and seafood industry are pretty shocking: http://fishfarmnews.blogspot.ca/2015/07/key-document-fish-farm-news-bites.html.
This is a list of more than 220 items in the past six months, including that
the CEO of Fredriksen, Jo Lunder (item 129), the company that owns Marine
Harvest, was sentenced to six months in jail for corruption. There are other
jail sentences in Norway. Why are we not dealing with these companies the same
way they are in Norway?

The
people of BC want our elected officials to do what we want: get fish farms out
of our pristine ocean, or they can take their few jobs back to Norway and set
up on land in their own country.

Finally,
my site is a global portal for fish farm environmental damage links, with more
than 150,000 page views from all around the world. It will reach a quarter of a
million in little more than a year: www.fishfarmnews.blogspot.com. Not surprisingly,
Norway leads the pack, with Sweden and Russia in pursuit.

Sunday, 13 December 2015

Last year Tom Cole gave me a disk of
Victoria area sport fishing history going back to the 1950s. One big file has the
50 year history of the Sport Fish Advisory Board as a Powerpoint presentation
along with a lot of historical images of our sport; the other big file is text
documents stretching over the horizon, including Alec Merriman columns from the
1960s, and so on.

Since I came to be the keeper of the
Ring, I pondered, Frodo-Baggins-like, what to do with it. And I had an interest
in seeing the history of the Saanich Inlet fishing being brought together as an
e-book before we lose the people who made the history, or those who knew those
who made the history. Of course, it was far more work for me to do than I
anticipated.

And the CD languished in the piles I
keep in lieu of proper filing cabinet stuff.
It has only taken me almost two years to have a bolt-of-lightning moment
(and refind the CD among the heaps and ruins of good intentions). It dawned on
me today that putting up a blog, which can be done for free on Google, and then
slowly filling it with the information I have and hope to receive from everyone,
so everyone can go take a read.

I’ll put up a ‘blogspot.com’ blog and
everything I receive can go there, along with an index, so available instantly
when stuff comes my way, and all Tom Coles stuff can be put up there, too.
Images include a young Bob Wright with a ‘busty’ award from Western Speedway, an
equally young Bing Crosby and the never-forgotten-once-you-met-him, crusty,
vituperative, bites-like-a-Pitbull Bill Otway and etc. The history of the SFAB
from its inception is worthy of being preserved for everyone interested in
such things. If anyone has a good name, let me know.

And, for God’s sake, if anyone knows how
to change a photo of a text document into a text document that can be copied
and pasted, please let me know. I had to print a ‘photo’ and then enter it all
by hand, rather than copy and paste.

Here is an interesting, historical, 1981
letter to the then DFO Minister, Romeo Leblanc (using the writer’s various text
methods):

This Association is comprised of 546
active members in our current membership year, which is the approximate average
for the last 25 years. The membership is
comprised of persons having two common basic similarities and they are:

(1)A
direct association with the Canadian Armed Forces, and

(2)An
interest in Sportfishing.

We believe that as CANADIANS we have “paid our dues” and our loyalty is
beyond question. You can take your united word for it, that sportfishing
restriction as announced are unworthy and basically dishonest. These
observation are made as a straight-forward assessment back by a great deal of
history and practical knowledge.

In 1963 this club wrote to the then
area Director Me. W.R., (Rod) HOURSTON and expressed our concern over the
declining stocks – which we attributed to the Juan de Fuca gauntlet net
fishery. We received rebuke for our expression of concern.

In 1964 as a member/club of the
Amalgamated Conservation Society, we were party to a brief presented to J. Angus McLEAN, the then Fisheries
Minister, again expressing our concern over declining stocks and our belief
that the Juan de Fuca gauntlet net fishery was the main contributor to the
decline of the hook and line fishery. To
show our sincerity we voluntarily recommended a cut in our daily bag limit down
to four salmon per day. The Department
gladly accepted our voluntary limit cut but continued on the path of fostering
the net fishery and actively assisted in the increase of the Seine fleet.

In 1967, with our sportfishing
success still on the decline and again in conjunction with the Amalgamated
Conservation Society, we protested so effectively as to finally obtain a public
meeting in Victoria with Dr. NEEDLER,
the then Deputy Minister of Fisheries.
He conceded that the gauntlet net fishery did in fact impact on the
Victoria-Sooke water front fishery. His
solution was to implement a sportfishing reserve in the easterly portion of Area
20. We expressed out considerable doubt
that this was the solution to our problem, and we have been proven right – it was
not the answer. Along about the same
time we had commenced advocacy of salmon enhancement, and one of the tools we
proposed was fish hatcheries. We were
told by the Department that salmon could not be effectively produced in
hatcheries. How wrong could they be?

Under the same Dr. NEEDLER,
statements were made regarding herring, one being that herring could be fished
in every known fashion and because their numbers were so large and they were so
prolific, the herring could never be fished out. We hasten to call your
recollection to the complete closure of
the herring net fishery that was required to afford the recovery of the stocks.
Another Department gem was that herring was not a major part of the Salmon’s
diet.

As proof that we were not insincere
about our concern over declining stocks, we commenced voluntary work assisting
fish guardians in stream work and fry salvage.
As early as the 1960’s we commenced ground works and negotiation to be
allowed to enhance salmonids in

The
Goldstream River. Ever since the
Amalgamated Conservation society has had an approved Salmonid Enhancement
Program on the Goldstream, the R.C.N. Anglers’ Association members have
actively and physically participated in the program which predates S.E.P by two
years.

You may wonder, Mr. Minister, why
the foregoing history lesson; well, we simply wish once and for all to establish
our credibility and to point out how the Fisheries Department alienated us as a
user group through their insistence on being wrong. The drastic restrictions imposed on the sport
fishery is again a demonstration of this propensity for being wrong.

We insist that a major influence on
chinook escapement is the incidental catch of chinooks in the gauntlet seine
fishery in Johnstone and Juan de Fuca Straits, just as it was 20 years
ago. The Department still fails to
recognize this fact; this fishery takes place so far from the rivers of origin
that stock management is impossible.

The effect of the gauntlet net fishery was
recognized by a former Minister of Fisheries, The Honourable Jack DAVIS. In a meeting with sportsfishermen in Victoria’s
Empress Hotel when he was still Minister, he actively advocated the return of
the net fishery to the river mouths, as a cleanup fishery where a finite stock
management would be possible – he had our agreement in this policy even though
it had little support by members of the Fisheries Department.

These regulation changes have “reached
in” and changed our our quality of life;
some measure of the importance of these regulations to our life style can be
taken from the observation that it was the very first item of news on the front
page of the TIMES-COLONIST News paper of
12 Februarry 1981, and was the lead
story on CHEK Television News on 11 February 1981. It is a topic of conversation throughout the
whole city and disbelief and indignation are the emotions being expressed. With
the Department’s past track record for making the wrong decision to resolve
problems, you can hardly wonder at our lack of faith in them.

If these regulations are
implemented, which will result in the mostly innocent sportsfisherman being
punished, and if the gauntlet net
continues the wild chinook stocks will NEVER recover – mark our words… The name of LEBLANC and the Liberal
government will never be forgotten by many thousands of Westcoast residents who
have lost a jewel out of the joy of living.
Shame, Mr. Minister, shame! Bloody
shame! You can, and must, do better than
this.

Sunday, 6 December 2015

Marine
Traffic: Previously, I mentioned that Marine
Traffic stations were being closed by the former federal government, which
included the Kitsilano Coast Guard station. A reader got me in touch with Allan
Hughes, President of Unifor Local 2182 – Marine Communicators Officers and he
brought me up to date on the issue. I pass along what he has to say.

Traffic, like aircraft control at an
airport, runs 24 hours a day, keeping boat traffic updated on current and upcoming
ship position – all ships over 20 metres. As industry runs 24 hours a day, it
is in the dark that you see the great benefit in knowing where everyone is. No
one is out at night who doesn’t belong there, hence pleasure craft operate only
in the day. Radar is mandatory on boats.

Traffic also tracks and relays communications
for boats in distress. All sport fishers have Traffic to thank when things turn
ugly during our trips. The Leviathan II tragedy off Tofino is an example of the
kind of situation Traffic could have handled. The problem is that the Ucluelet
Traffic station was closed, and that closure included the weather from
Amphritite Point. When you boat on the west coast, knowing current water
conditions is vital.

Hughes has this to say: “In 2012, the
Coast Guard Marine Communications and Traffic Services had 22 centres across
Canada. In May 2012, the Harper government announced, via C-38, that it would
consolidate centres across Canada, on the BC Coast, that meant the closure of
the centres in Vancouver, Ucluelet and Comox. In April 2015, Ucluelet was
closed and consolidated into Prince Rupert. In May 2015, Vancouver was closed
and consolidated into Victoria.”

When my main engine went kaput in the fog
south of Discovery Island many years ago and my kicker couldn’t outpace the
tide, it was Traffic Vancouver that picked up my distress call and sent the
Volunteer Unit from Oak Bay Marina to tow me in.

Comox is scheduled to close in the
spring, taking with it the Cape Lazo weather report. This leaves the entire
coast in the hands of only two stations: Victoria and Prince Rupert. Local
knowledge is thus very compromised, on a coast that has 25,000 km from Tswassen
to Portland Canal, and help could not be on the way. The Leviathan II situation
was luckily spotted by Ahousaht fishermen and local First Nation responders
saved many lives. The situation should not have happened, but if Traffic is
closed, the reality is that it can mean people die.

“The union representing MCTS officers
has been driving the campaign to stop the closures, Comox, the last centre left
to close, has a chance if public criticism is brought to bear on the new
government. The former Conservative government turned a blind ear to the cries
against the cuts to the Coast Guard in BC.”

The Kitsilano Coast Guard station is
being reopened by the new federal government. You might like to send Justin
Trudeau and DFO Minister Hunter Tootoo a note of support for Comox, etc. It
could be your rear end that is saved.

Pacific
Salmon Foundation: “In 2015, our donors
helped support 33 projects engaging 33 different partners in the Strait of
Georgia. In the weeks leading up to year-end we will send you highlights of
these projects. That's because this year-end we're asking supporters to make
a tax-receiptable year-end donation to support efforts to restore a wild
Coho and Chinook fishery in the Strait through our Salish
Sea Marine Survival Project.If you donate by midnight on December 31, 2015, your
donation will be doubled through our matching fund. Also, you will be entered
to win a hand-carved First Nations artist proof reel.”

The value of the fishery is
reasonably estimated as a $200 Million shot in the arm for sport fishing
revenues.

South
Vancouver Island Anglers Coalition: The pre-Christmas social occurs Tuesday,
December 8, 7PM, at the Esquimalt Anglers Clubhouse, 1101, Munroe Street. In
addition to the social, an update on SFAB activity regarding local waters will
be given. Also, Jerrod Pinder will provide info on the South Island Aggregate’s
Shawnigan toxic soil dump and possible effects on Shawnigan Creek and its coho
enhancement project.

If
you would like to pay your annual SVIAC dues, you may do so at: www.anglerscoalition.com.
This is a good thing to support, as it works on our behalf for local salmon
fisheries.

Watershed Watch Newsletter: This ENGO puts out a wide-ranging, weekly newsletter of salmon and
fisheries information. You can ask for it here: Watershed Watch Salmon Society hinkle@watershedwatch.ca.

Living Oceans:
also an ENGO, has an update on several fish farms issues: lice that are out of
control as much as 10 times the limit of 3 per fish; data on escaped Atlantics in
identified rivers in BC (this is something that previous, conventional data
suggested is not happening); and hiring someone to take on the file, as well as
push the new Trudeau government to finally undertake enacting the Cohen
Commission 75 recommendations that the previous government simply ignored.

About Me

I won the national RODERICK HAIG- BROWN AWARD, 2016, for environmental writing, largely for this blog (www.fishfarmnews.blogspot.com) that has become a global portal for the environmental damage made by Norwegian-style fish farms.
I won the Art Downs Award for 2012 for sustained and outstanding writing on environmental issues, in my case, fish farms.
The award was based on 10 columns on fish farm issues in the Times Colonist newspaper, three public submissions to the Cohen Commission on Fraser sockeye and this blog.
If you want to book me to speak, for a lecture, talk, or panel on fish farm environmental damage, contact me on this blog by leaving a message on a post.